There's nothing new about snow, but there might be something refreshing about a traditional news station's website showing a video blissfully void of journalistic interference. How perfect! What better way to depict a 'freshly fallen silent shroud of snow'?

For the majority of my past eleven A2As, I have set the goal of enjoying those bizarre 87 miles, to skate to the finish line happily and healthily, and never to be the paceline charity case. This year I fell far short of those ideals.

The subject of suitable skate socks crops up occasionally in skate discussion groups. Honestly, I've been trying to replenish my skate-sock supply now for over a year. Whenever I find the perfect pair, that very make and model disappears off the face of the Earth a year or so later when I have worn and washed the life out of the old ones.

Much like the night before the 2009 Carolina Century, I found myself sat bolt upright in bed at 3am on Sunday, worrying out loud about that day's inclement weather forecast, and our intention to skate 94 miles. Except this time I wasn't listening to the wind howl or acorns rattling on the roof, but wondering just how warranted the dangerous air quality forecast and excessive heat advisory were.

Roadskater and I skated about 34 miles at the Lewisville, NC Cycle Therapy Tour to Tanglewood training ride this weekend. I hadn't skated the majority of the roads on this route before, and was pleasantly surprised to find them relatively traffic-free. Even as we plodded back into town, there was only a minor amount of traffic, with no (audibly) angry drivers.

This year's Tour de Lions was a hot 'n' bumpy one!
Roadskater and I opted for the '40' mile option, which turned out to be 44 miles by my Garmin Forerunner 305. I thought those few rounds at Country Park were sufficient preparation for the Tour de Lions hills, but just like clockwork this May the Tour de Lions reminded me how far I have to go to be ready for A2A in October.

After twelve years driving my 1998 Saturn SL with manual transmission, the poor thing finally died at about 240,000 miles. I have spent the past three months immersed in the car-buying process, having never gone through it entirely on my own before. About halfway through it I felt like a horizontal asymptote: forever approaching the point of zero but destined never to actually get there.

Spring is here and I'm talking about calories again! It's way beyond time to try to shed some Winter flab, and as I conveniently forget my approximate daily caloric requirement each year, I run to the online daily calorie expenditure calculators. Inevitably I feel like I'm wasting my time and that nobody really knows how close those numbers are. I conclude that if I'm hungry I'm probably losing weight.